She got game: St. Pete Opera’s ‘Merry Widow’ is a real player

In Kelli Butler’s mind, the lines between reality, fantasy and creativity aren’t merely blurred – they’re practically nonexistent.

As an opera singer and performer, Butler – who’s heading the cast of St. Petersburg Opera Company’s The Merry Widow, opening Friday at the Palladium – is proficient at inhabiting fictional characters, giving them life and moving them around a stage like pieces on a chessboard.

It’s very similar, she insists, to the other passion in her life. With more than 10,700 followers, the New York-based vocal artist is a rising star in the Twitterverse (she’s known as #OperaGeek) because of her colorful presence on Twitch and other streaming platforms. She’s in demand and often plays for charity. There are many titles in her arsenal, but she plays Dungeons & Dragons – the gold standard of role-playing games – masterfully.

“Dungeons and Dragons is usually what’s called a tabletop role-playing game,” Butler explains. “TTRPG, as we say! However, there are now online things like Roll20 and D&D Beyond that allow you to make your roles, build maps and play online with your friends when you’re not near each other.”

It took her a long time to stream D&D, Butler says, “because I was so afraid of making mistakes in front of people.” The online public-gaming community, as a rule, does not suffer fools gladly.

Eventually, she learned how to leave her inhibitions at the door, to laugh, joke and take the heat, and to develop a true game face. “When you’re streaming, you can see the other players,” Butler explains. “I have two monitors on my computer, so while one monitors has the map and everything, on the other I have the other player’s faces up, so I can watch them.

“Because just like onstage, you’re watching for visual cues of what your character’s going to do – because, of course, it’s all improv -and you’re also watching to make sure your scene partner’s comfortable. It’s very important that you’re not pushing things too far.”

So Kelli Butler is both a professional coloratura soprano and a professional gamer. “To me, streaming and gaming are just extensions of what I do onstage,” she believes.

“Of course, that’s not saying that every performer’s going to like gaming – but I can tell you this, there’s a lot of opera singers that play D&D.”

Opera came first, sort of. Butler, a military brat, lived all over the world with her family before things settled down in San Antonio, Texas, where she attended a performing arts high school.

Her dad, who’d graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a degree in opera but never pursued it as a career, nevertheless schooled Kelli from an early age. One of her earliest memories is hearing a recording of Madama Butterfly with Leontyne Price – one of her father’s favorites – and Richard Tucker.

He took her to see her first opera, La Traviata, when she was 14 – and by then, she was already immersed in musical theater. “I was never one of the popular kids,” Butler relates. “I was skipped a grade, so I was two years younger than everybody – and I was also the weird kid who liked fantasy and sci-fi. So I wasn’t really accepted. I joke that my entire school life, I ate my lunch alone in the theater. I stayed home from my prom to play Final Fantasy VII.”

As her voice matured, her teachers advised her to think about opera studies. She did, and fell head over heels in love with it.

“Musical theater really grew out of the opera tradition,” she says. “Opera was the musical theater of its time. The themes and the humanity contained in them are timeless. They’re going to affect everybody, no matter who they are or what they’re used to listening to.”

Premiered in Vienna in 1905, Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow is an operetta, which means the dialogue is spoken, rather than sung. In that way, operetta is closer to contemporary musical theater than to the grand, sung-through operas of the great European halls.

Butler with Pedro Barbosa (Camille) and Catie Shelley (Valiencienne). Photo by Jim Swallow/Packinghouse Gallery.

It’s the story of a forward-thinking woman from the small (and fictional) Balkan country of Pontevedro. Recently widowed after just five days of marriage, she’s living in Paris and surrounded by would-be suitors, all of whom are really after the 20 million francs she inherited from her late husband.

Although written (and most commonly performed) in German, it’s a universal story, with laughs, romantic subplots, lots of waltzing and lots of stellar vocalizing. “Don’t worry about the language,” says Butler, “because if we’re doing our job, you’re going to feel what you’re supposed to feel.”

It’s a win-win this time around. St. Petersburg Opera Company is performing the English-language version of The Merry Widow.

Kelli Butler is famous for playing D&D, Witcher 3 and other virtual games live, in real time, with opponents from around the world. But there’s more that makes her, unequivocably, The Opera Geek.

A year ago, she co-authored (with Hannah Rose) an entirely new sub-class for Dungeons and Dragons. “The character class that I became well-known for playing is the Bard,” Butler explains. “The Bard is the musician, The Bard is the witty one – have this ability called Vicious Mockery, where we can literally hurt somebody by insulting then. Which is fantastic!

“But I noticed in the official paperwork that Bards have to choose an instrument. Voice was not included. I was a little offended – because that goes back to that old argument that singers are not musicians – and I went on Twitter and said ‘I want an opera sub-class for the Bard. I want a College of the Opera!’”

Rose suggested they write it together and try to publish it through the official Dungeon Masters Guild. They did, and they did, and College of the Opera, publicized via social media by opera companies throughout America, went viral. It also went platinum, selling more than 1,500 copies.

“We have ‘Proficiency with Extra Language,’” Butler announces proudly. “All of the reaction abilities are named after actual opera things. You can capture people’s souls with your voice.” On the cover is a photo of Butler’s memorable performance with St. Pete Opera in February 2018, as the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute.

So here’s Kelli Butler, role-playing again, this time as a warrior princess using her celebrity to draw attention to opera in the 21^st century.

“I think that by combining the geeky side of me with opera, it kind of showed people it’s not this hoity-toity thing,” she says. “It’s much more accessible, and the themes are much more timeless, than you think.”

The Merry Widow info and tickets here.